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Both professional and classroom‐based scientific communities develop and test explanatory models of the natural world. For students to take up models as tools for sensemaking, practice must be agentive (where students use and revise modelsforspecific purposes) and conceptually productive (where students make progress on their ideas). In this paper, we explore principles to support agentive and conceptually productive modeling. One is that models can “do work”; that is, participate in students' sensemaking by offering resources, making gaps visible, or pushing back on modelers' understandings. A second is that working across, and seeking to align, multiple models—what we explain asinterlockingmodels—supports models to do work. A third is that modeling activity can support fine‐grained conceptual progress. We detail how we used these ideas to guide and refine the design of a fifth‐grade investigation into the conservation of matter across phase change. We identify four ways that models participated in students' sensemaking as they interlocked: by providingcontradictions,constraints,representational surplus, andgapsfor students to engage with. We discuss how designing for models to be co‐participants in sense‐making and to interlock can provide productive paths forward for curriculum designers, researchers, and teachers.

 

There is now a significant research literature devoted to reconceptualizing scientific activities, such as modeling, explanation, and argumentation, to realize a vision of science‐as‐practice in classrooms. As yet, however, not all scientific practices have received equal attention.Planning and Carrying out Investigationsis one of the eight scientific practices identified in the Next Generation Science Standards, and there is a long line of research from both psychological and science education traditions that addresses topics about investigation, such as the generation and interpretation of evidence. However, investigation has not been subject to concerted reconceptualization within recent research and instructional design efforts focused on science‐as‐practice. In this article, we propose a framework that centers the investigation as a key locus for constructing alignments among phenomena, data, and explanatory models and makes visible the work that scientists engage in as they develop and stabilize alignments. We argue that these alignments are currently under‐theorized and under‐utilized in instructional environments. We explore four opportunities that we argue are both accessible to students from a young age and can support conceptual innovation. These are (a) developing empirical systems, (b) getting a grip on empirical systems, (c) determining, defining and operationalizing data as “evidence,” and (d) making sense of what the results of empirical systems do and do not help us understand.

 

Experiments and other empirical investigations are, at heart, tools that scientists use to represent phenomena that are difficult to observe, measure, and compare: they are ways to "get a grip" on the world. In contrast, in elementary science classrooms, we often simplify investigations and provide step-by-step instructions telling students what to see so that they reach a desired conclusion. Here, Manz shares a framework for rethinking the classroom investigation. She describes how this framework better represents how scientists use investigations and supports opportunities for elementary students to engage in argumentation, explanation, and planning and carrying out investigations. She then discusses strategies that teachers can use to design or adapt investigations by implementing the framework.